A political dinosaur

It sure didn’t take long for the city’s incompetent and obsolete Board of Elections to foul up again.

Expecting better was unrealistic even after the patronage-laden relic emerged relatively unscathed from its transition on Election Day (Nov. 2) to high-tech voting.

As it turns out, the error-filled September primary was more characteristic of its old-fashioned ways, which date from the horse-and-buggy era of Tammany Hall.

In the past few days, some registered voters have begun to receive in the mail instructions on how to use defunct lever-pull machines - the system the Board of Elections just replaced by computer scanning.

“Part the curtain and enter,” the instructions state. “Pull the large red handle once to the right. Do not touch the red handle again until after you have made all of your selections. Push the levers next to the candidates you want. . . . When you are finished, leave the levers down and pull the large red handle all the way to the left . . . Part the curtains and exit.”

Say what?

The outdated information was attached to notices sent by the Board of Elections to voters who have changed their address, or who have had a change of location in their polling site.

Our reaction echoes that of Mid-Island City Councilman James Oddo: “This is a disgrace,” he said. “The Board of Elections is dysfunctional. It should be gutted. This is not exhibit A; this is exhibit 3,000.”

Blaming the state Board of Elections in Albany, the city board, an independent agency, claimed it had no choice but to knowingly issue the old voting instructions with the notices. It said Albany had not provided the city with updated how-to-vote information.

The state board’s reply? Nothing in the law required the city to add the old instructions to the forms that acknowledged and approved new registrations by voters.

It’s a typical old-style fiasco just weeks after the first full-scale voting in November with the new optical-scan devices. The switch was made to modern balloting in order to comply with a federal mandate that requires an official paper record of each vote, something the decades-old lever-type machines couldn’t generate.

After problems with the new system arose during the primary voting in September, there were a variety of concerns that ultimately failed to spoil the general election. There had been worries about the two-sided ballot, confusing instructions, small print, lack of training for election workers and privacy issues.

Yet, despite all of that, the Nov. 2 balloting was considered a success.

Key exception: The city Board of Elections missed the legal deadline for mailing absentee ballots to its share of the state’s 20,000 members of the U.S. military.

Previously, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a long-time critic of the elections board, had denounced as a “royal screw-up” other snags and delays that occurred during the primary. One result of those problems was that the board ousted its executive director after he had served for only a few weeks in his $172,753-a-year job. The post had long been vacated due to political squabbling.

The 10 commissioners on the Board of Elections (two from each borough) are appointed by the City Council upon the recommendation of both political parties. Through time-worn patronage, a staff is hired to oversee operations and employ poll workers.

Although it is funded by the city, the Board of Elections isn’t required like other municipal agencies to disclose its financial records. Not until last year was it even included in the annual Mayor’s Management Report, for which it provides only partial information.

Mr. Bloomberg, who wants to overhaul the politicized system, dismisses complaints from the board that it is underfunded.

“We have a check sitting ready for the Board of Elections for $20 million,” Mr. Bloomberg has said for years. “But they are not getting the money until they tell us what they are going to do with it. This has been preposterous.”

He calls the board the last city agency in which political bosses still call the shots.

Like the mayor, we believe that major non-partisan reforms have been overdue for years. In the new age of high-tech voting, the Board of Elections clings to its old way of doing business. For how much longer is anybody’s guess.